Reducing the size of PNG images is important when dealing with web applications and specially with J2ME applications. Some tools that can be used for this are:

• PNGOUT from http://advsys.net/ken/utils.htm
• PngCrush from http://pmt.sourceforge.net/pngcrush/
• OptiPNG from http://optipng.sourceforge.net/

http://www.erlang.org

Extract from the FAQ:

Erlang is a general-purpose programming language and runtime environment. Erlang has built-in support for concurrency, distribution and fault tolerance. Erlang is used in several large telecommunication systems from Ericsson. The most popular implementation of Erlang is available as open source from the open source erlang site.

JQuery: http://jquery.com/

Prototype: http://www.prototypejs.org/

Prototype is a JavaScript Framework that aims to ease development of dynamic web applications.Featuring a unique, easy-to-use toolkit for class-driven development and the nicest Ajax library around, Prototype is quickly becoming the codebase of choice for web application developers everywhere.

MochiKit: http://mochikit.com/

MochiKit is a highly documented and well tested suite of JavaScript libraries

Javala is an open learning environment, developed at the TUT Institute of Software Systems, for learning the Java programming language

http://javala.cs.tut.fi/

My Dell 600m laptop’s screen just got busted. But all may not be lost. I found several compatible LCD’s on ebay.

Also this article has details on how to disassemble the LCD.

WxWidgets is a cross platform GUI Toolkit.

The easy way to get started is to download wxDev-C++, an IDE with a GUI form designer for WxWidgets.

Alternatively, you can download MinGW and MSYS from http://www.mingw.org and download WxWidgets separately from http://www.wxwidgets.org

I came across two useful utilities that can be used for hard disk recovery.  Both are open source and multi platform.

TestDisk and Photorec. See:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/ 

I came across a good article on using xml::simple with perl at IBM developerWorks.

I looked at the MIT OpenCourseWare web site after a long time. They have a much bigger collection of courses now. Maybe I’ll get around to looking at some courses.

While looking for similar web sites, I came across HP learning center. They offer free, instructor-led classes.

And some more that I came across:

• Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative
• Berkley webcasts
• Harvard@Home Mulimedia resources at Harvard

I just tried out Talk and write for skype, a whiteboarding tool that uses skype for communication. It’s useful, but doesn’t have too many features. Good for two people to interactively discuss and comment on a document or diagram.  It is windows only, though.

Bitwise IM also features a whiteboard. It is also free for personal use and is multiplatform (Windows, Mac and Linux).

DimDim also looks interesting, it bills itself as “The worlds free webmeeting.” I’m yet to try it though.